In the processing of enveloped mail that is being prepared for delivery to a Post Office, mail pieces are assembled from inserts that are placed into envelopes to form mail pieces. In contemporary mail processing, a mailer has a mail list program that is maintained on a processor, such as a main frame, and various components of a mail processing system will respond in accordance with the mail list program. There are a number of commercially available mail lists from software companies that will update and standardize such mail lists. These mail lists contain the names and addresses of recipients of a particular run of mail. An example of such a mail list program is FINALIST.RTM. which checks the mainframe mailing list and improves it by standardizing the format. It also verifies and corrects address elements, appends carrier route, five-digit zip and Zip+4 codes. The FINALIST.RTM. program also identifies addresses with insufficient delivery information and reports the deficiency by category. Another program that is available for mail processing is MAILERS CHOICE.RTM. with which mail can be sorted for maximum postal discounts to the mailer and with which a final file can be produced. All but one of the discounts from the postal service requires correct traying to receive the discount. Both FINALIST.RTM. and MAILERS CHOICE.RTM. are trademarks of LPC Corporation.
Normally, a printer prints documents, such as a series of letters, under control of a mail list program and conveys those documents to an inserter sequentially. The inserter will then add selected inserts for each document in accordance with the program and these inserts, along with the document, will be inserted into an envelope to form the final mail piece. Usually, the envelope will be a windowed envelope whereby the address printed on the document will be visible through the window.
The mail pieces can either be weighed or their weights computed from their contents. Subsequently, other operations will take place such as determining the amount of postage, accounting for the postage, reading the zip code on the address of the mail pieces and printing a postal bar code on the envelope in response to such reading. The mail pieces are then placed in a tray in accordance to postal requirements to be sent to the post office. The tray must have a label attached thereto that identifies the mailer and the contents of the tray with regard to the class of mail, level of sortation, location of the post office and the ultimate destination of the mail including the zip code. Some of this information can be in bar code format.
In order for the mail tray to be labeled, a clerk must physically prepare a label or the clerk will be supplied with pre-printed or partially pre-printed labels by the postal service. In either case, there are certain disadvantages. If the clerk manually prepares the label as required, this is time consuming, could be illegible and not in a form supporting postal automation goals. On the other hand, if preprinted labels are supplied to the mail clerk, then a vast inventory of labels must be kept on hand and the clerk must select the appropriate label to be attached to the mail tray thus introducing probabilities of errors. Obviously, both of these schemes are time consuming and expensive. It would be advantageous to have a scheme whereby labels can be prepared in an automatic fashion to match the mail pieces in a tray. The labelled trays would enter the post office and provide more reliable and greater information than presently available from pre-printed labels, thus assuring rapid, accurate movement of the tray through the postal distribution network. It should be kept in mind that if the tray is mislabelled, its entire contents, in the neighborhood of 450 mail pieces, could be misdirected causing de-sortation of the contents at the misdirected final location because the postal service sorter program would not be programmed to find the individual pieces.